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Devs Bet Big On Android Over Apple's iOS

Posted by Soulskill on from the striding-toward-peak-apps dept.

CWmike writes "A majority of mobile app developers see Android as the smart bet over the long run even as they vote for Apple's iOS in the short term, according to a survey conducted jointly by Appcelerator and IDC. The survey polled more than 2,300 developers who use Appcelerator's Titanium cross-platform compiler to produce iOS and Android native apps. Of the 2,300 polled, 59% said that Android had the 'best long-term outlook,' compared with just 35% who pegged Apple's iOS with that label. But three out of four said that iOS offers the best 'near-term' outlook, with 76% tagging Apple's operating system as the best revenue opportunity."

15 of 328 comments (clear)

  1. That sounds about right.... by hackel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Apple users are used to paying for costly proprietary applications, so of course there is a better revenue opportunity. I just find it so disgusting that there are so many developers all of a sudden interested in making money from their code. It seems Apple is doing more to destroy the environment created by the open source community than any other company...

    1. Re:That sounds about right.... by Jonas+the+Bold · · Score: 3, Interesting

      So in a ideal capitalist society, a person would be encouraged to save everyone a million man-hours because if he made something that useful he'd become rich.

      In an idealized communist society, it's to each according to need and from each according to ability, so that person would be encouraged to save everyone a million man hours for no reward, but just because he has the ability.

      In your idealized society, you think he should be paid based on... how many hours he worked? Your hybrid economic system removes both the altruistic motive of communism and the reward motive of capitalism.

      So you've invented the worst economic system possible. Congrats!

      --
      Everything seemed to be going so nice
      'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
    2. Re:That sounds about right.... by AnonymousClown · · Score: 2, Interesting

      . If it saves 1 million man hours, then it's a net win for the human race . Yay.

      I read an article recently that basically blames IT for the destruction of the middle class.

      --
      RIP America

      July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001

    3. Re:That sounds about right.... by Zixaphir · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's sad, because the apple marketplace actually discourages using open code. You can't install anything that isn't through the app store, and you can't put anything on the app store without the intent to make money off of it. Otherwise, you're penalized with a developer fee that comes out of your own pocket with no way to have that fee waived. Free software is DOA on iOS.

      --
      "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
    4. Re:That sounds about right.... by MrHanky · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What you want is, in other words, more capitalism: people shouldn't own the fruits of their labour, but rather have to give it up for free, getting paid for selling their work hours instead. That's practically Marx's definition of the capitalist mode of exploitation. Of course, in your mind, I suppose the capitalist would have to be the state (otherwise, the people owning the work would still be able to get paid over and over), so your perfect mode of capitalist exploitation would be some kind of state capitalism instead.

      Has your mother told you that you're an imbecile?

    5. Re:That sounds about right.... by teh+kurisu · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That doesn't mean that Android sales in the UK didn't get a helping hand from the US networks. Smartphone platforms have a chicken-and-egg problem; customers need to know that there is a viable ecosystem of applications, and the people developing those applications need to know that there is a market for them.

      What has happened, in my opinion, AT&T's iPhone exclusivity in the US has given Android a leg-up, which has provided a customer base for the Android Marketplace, which has made Android a more attractive proposition to customers worldwide.

      I've got no idea how well Android phones sell in the UK either. I know a large number of people with iPhones and only three (maybe four) with Android phones, but again, this is nowhere near representative.

  2. Re:woowoo by WarJolt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Rejecting apps is only the tip of the iceberg. Objective-c is Apples attempt to co-opt developers. This has backfired. Developers like freedom to own what they make and not be locked into a solution. I can use C,C++ and java on any desktop system really easily. Rejecting apps is all part of Apples attempt to lock you in. Conform or die. Resistance if futile.

    Apples attempt to assimilate developers will fail.

  3. It's all about the per user spend up by w0mprat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think Apples walled garden approach may result in more per-user spend. But that's about it. A many times larger user base, I don't see Android's market share plateauing until it is many times that of iOS. It always makes sense to target the larger user base as a starting point (but only as a crude rule of thumb of course). This is a repeat of the Mac vs PC era and again Apple is just to selfish.

    However, this time the OS competing with the Apple camp is *really good* and Android is so far ahead of everything it's not funny. Apple is being forced to eat humble pie and add features that Android pioneered and thus demonstrated Apple was wrong about, it's gotta be a sign.

    Oh and the Android development community is fscking awesome.

    --
    After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
  4. Shared libraries are a big key by antifoidulus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The biggest PITA isn't the whole app store process etc. its the fact that developers cannot:
    a)You cannot make your own dynamic libraries, only static ones(though the OS obviously supports it, you can include any of Apple's own dyilibs in your project) I don't need to go into why dynamic linking is much better than static....
    b)There really isn't a clean way to talk between applications. You can send files, but it's really a drop box, I can COPY(not link!) something into another apps area, but after that the file is no longer mine. So if I want to send something to another app to process and then get it back to do some processing by my application I have to hope the app tells me about the changes, and considering the app may not even know I exist(nor should it, thats the beauty of decoupling), thats a lot to ask.

    I can *sort* of understand 1 from a performance standpoint, if you allow user created dynamic libraries every time the application is swapped out of memory you have to find which dynamic libraries it uses, make sure nobody else is using them, then unload them. However as memory increases the rationale behind needing to constantly load/unload them starts to disappear.....

    Maybe Apple will change it's tune, but long term I think you will be able to do more interesting things with Android because it allows for the creation of dynamic libraries and inter-application communication.

    --
    Monstar L
  5. Re:Sampling bias? by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually I'm pretty surprised they could find 2,300 developers who use Appcelerator's Titanium cross-platform compiler at all. Did they make answering the poll questions a part of installing the software? And does this whole story sound like a slashvertizement to anyone else?

    Honestly I like Android, and I like iOS, but the GUI layout models are so different, I can't imagine a single system working well for both. Does anyone have experience with it?

    --
    Qxe4
  6. Re:woowoo by justin12345 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Looking at the title of the summary: "Devs Bet Big On Android Over Apple's iOS"

    Then look at the statistics quoted:

    Long Term: 59% Android, 35% Apple, and 6% other (undecided, supports both, or neither)

    Short Term: 76% Apple

    I hardly call that "betting big" on Android. Personally I'll "bet big" that Apple gradually relaxes out of its "walled garden" approach, Google will drift toward higher standards for its market place apps... and ultimately whoever designs (or supports) the shiniest phones will win. Slashdotter's sometimes forget, hardware aesthetics often are the deciding factor.

    --
    Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
  7. Re:As a consumer I still have reservations... by Miamicanes · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > If you have brand x phone and I have brand y and you have a cool app, will it really work on my phone with a different processor,
    > screen geometry, camera, sensors, etc?

    Basically, yes. For the same reason you can run the same Windows and Linux software regardless of whether your x86 CPU was made by AMD or Intel, and use 3D graphics regardless of whether the video chipset was made by AMD, nVidia, or Intel. Strictly speaking, native code compiled for ARM won't work on an x86-architecture device running Android... but as a practical matter, just about every Android device that matters financially to real-world developers has an ARM processor.

    Ditto for frameworks. The "Android Fragmentation" problem isn't due to a need to write one set of programs that work with SenseUI, another set that work with TouchWiz, and another set that work with MotoBlur. It's due to the fact that SenseUI, TouchWiz, and Motoblur keep phone owners shackled to old versions of Android because every new version tends to catastrophically break the manufacturers' proprietary "frameworks" that nothing besides the manufacturer's own apps use, and every major new version of Android has introduced lots of badly-needed basic features that were missing from early versions, so being shackled to an older version of Android really, really sucks. That's why so many Android owners have mixed feelings about SenseUI in particular -- it's very pretty. When it's cutting-edge, it's great. It's shiny, cool, and pretty. But 3 months later, when the next major version of Android gets released that leapfrogs ahead of the version chained down by SenseUI, it's an ugly ball and chain that holds back the rest of Android from progressing until HTC gets SenseUI working with the new version of Android.

  8. Re:Not a surprise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There are a lot of 5 lines-of-code tweaks I would like to apply to my phone. But as far as I know the Droid X will brick me if I try rolling my own. Not exactly as open as the Nokia Linux phone.

  9. Re:Not a surprise by dwater · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...and Meego. Both Symbian and Meego are more open than Android (iinm), because there is no one member controlling it - ie they both have councils/etc.

    In comparison, Android is a poor bet, if you ask me. I say this not only because it isn't very open to collaboration, but also because it is designed to profit Google in ways that other key players also want to profit - ie services. Sure, they can fork it and do whatever they want, but that just becomes fragmented and is only Android in name (which might be enough to dumb consumers, I suppose). Manufacturers like that they can see the code, but to changing it means it isn't 'comes with Google'.

    Android is "Open" as in "Window", but not "Open" as in "Door".

    But I'm sure some would disagree...and I'm quite interested in the counter arguments. So 'fire!'...

    --
    Max.
  10. Re:woowoo by Vintermann · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If 100% native apps written in C/C++ (or even Go) were possible, I'd already be developing for android

    http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html#overview

    Just about the only thing you will need to use the DalvikJava for is integration with the app system. Which you want.

    --
    xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.